Murder
by Still Bullet
Summary: He was expecting more from the hedgehog. But he wasn't expecting this to happen. One-shot...that's not based on Half-Life? Whoa!


**_Wow, I uh...whao. Did I write this? _**

**_Ok, now this is weird. I tried writing a Sheckley and Griggs story today, but could hardly make it past the second line before getting a horrible writer's block. But, I was cruising around deviantART a few hours ago, and came across a lot of cool stuff, mainly a comic. I was also playing "Sonic Adventure 2: Battle" today, and my thoughts just kinda went around, to the point where I felt like writing._**

**_I wrote this in an hour. Whoa, that's crazy, even for me! I mean, this story only riggs in at 1,700 words, but...still. Anyway, I love Shadow and the whole rivalry he has with Sonic (too bad they had to seriously screw up his history so many damn times). Anyway, here's a Sonic one-shot for your enjoyment! This takes place after the boss battle between Sonic and Shadow on the ARK, by the way._**

**_Based On: Sonic Adventure 2 (Sonic Team/SEGA. HOLY HELL, I'm not writing for Half-Life?!)  
Rating: K+ for blood and a dead dude  
Author's Notes: I actually quit the Sonic fandom in the summer of '06, since I felt that he was going seriously downhill. But, I've been a fan of him since I was eight, and he was my first video game to play, and refuse to let that old school fandom die! I'm just a hardcore fan like that.  
I know the majority of the Sonic fandom are a bunch of little dudes, so PLEASE don't get on my back for the whole killing thing. It just came to me as a "What if?" idea, and evolved into...yeah, that.  
Also, I think this takes the cake for the first Sonic one-shot that doesn't involve romance or an original character addition in a while (not like there's anything wrong with that, but again, you're talking to a hardcore fan here who researches absoluetly every single detail about a game to keep it as canon as possible).  
Those of you who've read my Half-Life one-shots, expect a "And Then Came The Thunder" kind of deal, here._**

--

"Ugh…not bad, faker."

He never thought those would be the last words he'd ever hear from the blue hedgehog. He expected more…strength, stamina, life from the being. But perhaps he had expected too much. Perhaps he had _done _too much.

He didn't know much about life. He still questioned how he was able to have one. But from what he had heard, from what he had collected from his memory files, this hedgehog appeared to be terminated. His body lay unanimated before him, thick blue quills torn apart into raggedy, pointed strands. A pool of a dark red liquid came from underneath his stomach. He touched the liquid with his gloved fingers, the fabric quickly absorbing it into its dirty white strands.

The liquid was warm. It didn't have much of an odor for the hedgehog to care about, and he didn't think that tasting a liquid that poured out from a freshly-added corpse would be a good idea. What was this thick substance, exactly? He carefully searched his memory files to find any hint as to what it could be identified as.

"_Ow!" The young girl exclaimed the word with a sense of danger, making the protective dark hedgehog's ears flick back in worry._

"_What is it, Maria?" he asked the young girl, as he felt his furry eyebrows raise upwards, allowing his red irises a full view to what the current situation was. He could feel the energy in his body swirl around as he felt his muscles tighten, getting prepared should he have the need to defend._

"_Oh, Shadow!" The blonde hair of the girl drifted in front of her large sapphire eyes, which she brushed away with a single hand. She said the words with shock, but not of the danger she was facing, instead of the appearance of the hedgehog. "D…don't worry. It's fine, really."_

_The words didn't exactly comfort the hedgehog's thoughts. He carefully scanned the body of the human girl before him, his high-tech synthetic eyes trying to notice anything that appeared to be wrong. There was a…cut, of some sorts, across the skin layer of the girl's hand. It was long—however, slim—but he scanned it with curiosity._

"_What is that?" he questioned, pointing to her injury. A dark red liquid slowly poured out from the cut, dripping down the child's fingers and onto her blue nightgown. The girl looked at the hedgehog with some kind of a positive emotion—he wasn't sure if it was the emotion "happiness" she constantly showed him or some other emotion not listed in his files. _

"_It's blood." The tone of her voice sounded odd to the hedgehog; the word itself sounded like it could be of importance, yet the young girl said the word with a feeling of uncertainty, a sense that it "wasn't a big deal", which was a phrase she had told him in an earlier time. The hedgehog carefully examined the wound, along with the blood, collecting the information into his thoughts, listing it under his "Memory" category. _

"_I will go get the Professor," the hedgehog soon told her, beginning to step away from the young girl. "Will you be all right here on your own?" The pair of sapphire eyes sparkled as she nodded. Her expression showed confidence._

"_Oh, yes. Don't worry, Shadow, I'll be fine. Just tell my grandfather that I cut my hand." The hedgehog nodded as a response._

"_Understood," he said, as he clicked on his hover blades and made his way towards the Professor's room._

So that was what the liquid was that covered his glove. It was blood. He quickly scanned the corpse of the blue hedgehog. Was there a cut on his stomach, perhaps? He was unable to tell, as the hedgehog was lying on his stomach, where the blood leaked from. He tried to repeat his most recent memory of the hedgehog, of what could have possibly killed him.

Blinding yellow lights flashed from his raised arm, becoming thick streaks as they danced around the blue hedgehog. They came out from his palm after he used a command; the words, "Chaos control", to be exact. From what he had collected from his memory, the attack had hit him directly in his mid back, apparently piercing through his stomach and dropping the hedgehog to his knees. He then said those last few words, and his killer watched as the victim's green irises faded, tan eyelids slowly closing.

Funny. Those eyes were filled with confidence, filled with a sparkle of hope, when they were running down that hallway earlier. What did the blue hedgehog call himself again? He ran through his memory files once again as a way to find an answer.

"_What are you, anyway?"_

"_What you see is what you get. Just a guy that loves adventure." The blue hedgehog turned his head to face the path before the two. "I'm Sonic the hedgehog!"_

"Sonic…" The black hedgehog let the words out with a bit of sympathy, not because of his current state, but because of how weak he appeared compared to the Ultimate Life Form.

It was a shame, really. This hedgehog proved to be quite a challenge. From the others he had experience—the so-called hedgehog's "friends"—none of them we able to even keep up with the blue hedgehog, without some form of assistance. The fox-boy had to be in a machine modified from what appeared to be a transforming one-person aircraft in order to keep up with the blue hedgehog's speed—even then, the fox-boy could only go as fast as the blue hedgehog's slowest movements. The pink hedgehog that had mistaken him for the likes of the other didn't seem to go very fast; in fact, she could hardly even run away from the Doctor's Eggmobile in the earlier twenty-four hours.

The hedgehog challenged him in ways he wasn't expecting, however. How he was able to perform chaos control, let alone with the fake Chaos Emerald, was something beyond his understanding. It didn't appear that his rival understood why, either. It should have been impossible. _He_ was the Ultimate Life Form. Shadow the Hedgehog. Nothing could surpass his abilities. Nothing would ever be able to stop him.

He looked down at the hedgehog once again. What was the term used when a life had been terminated? He searched his memory banks once again.

Death. Is that what they called it? He looked up the word within his files, as a way to find more information.

_Death (deth)_

_-noun_

_1. The act of dying; the end of a life; the total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions of an organism _

The first definition of the word had basically explained to him the answer to all that he had wondered. He looked on, however, at the rest of the definitions. One of them happened to spark his interest, as he read over it again with full concentration.

_9. Bloodshed or murder_

The hedgehog looked at the corpse of his rival. The mouth of the carcass was slightly ajar, with a thin trail of blood leaking out from the lips. The hedgehog crossed his arms, looking at the corpse with more thoughts than his mind could comprehend swirling about within his synthetic skull. _Bloodshed_. He thought about the word with great detail.

There was no way even _his_ questioning mind could miss it—bloodshed was definitely present around the body. His thoughts soon concentrated on the next word: _murder_. He quickly defined murder, which he found to be defined as the act of a human being killing another of its kind. The hedgehog let out a slight sigh, closing his eyelids for a brief moment, limiting its red eyes to viewing darkness and that only.

It didn't appear that he had murdered Sonic the Hedgehog. If the definition didn't list it as a hedgehog killing another of its kind, then it couldn't be murder, could it? But what if hedgehogs were counted as people in this world, this…Earth? Were Sonic and his friends treated as human beings? Would he be, too, if he had lived with the public in Station Square?

He flicked his tongue inside his mouth as he realized he had just called the blue hedgehog by his name. The hedgehog was nothing but a nuisance, an annoying creature that tried his best to stop their plans. But he failed.

He didn't want to show this being respect. He never even called the hedgehog by his name before. The hedgehog didn't deserve his respect.

For one more time, the black hedgehog looked at the body of the blue one. It could have been the light tricking his artificial eyes, but it seemed as though the deep blue color of the hedgehog's quills appeared to be a bit…paler. The dark hedgehog let out a grunt, his red irises looking away from the body of the hero.

"Dissapointing." He let the words slip out of his mouth, a hint of some sort of emotion surrounding it. Anger, hatred, misery? His thoughts could not figure out what it was.

"I thought you were better than that."

A thought unknown to the hedgehog soon shot through his mind, like that of one of his own Chaos Spears. It was an emotion he had never felt before—the very thought of it seemed to overload his mind. It felt like sympathy, but in an odd sort of way. He shook his head as he didn't want to think about it anymore. He wasn't much of a killer. The only deaths he had caused were the destruction of the many robots sent by GUN to stop them. They all ended up like Sonic. Only in heaps of shrapnel and metal.

Sonic was actually a being. He wasn't a cold-hearted machine. But what did he know? He had only met the hedgehog more than twenty-four hours ago. He tossed his hand towards the corpse, as if to throw away his thoughts.

"Sayonara…Sonic the Hedgehog."

--

_OHMYGOD, YOUKILLEDSONIKU!_

_So, uhh...yeah. Hated to do that, but again, just thought of a "What if Sonic killed Shadow?" plot bunny. But that somehow changed into "What if Shadow killed Sonic?" instead, since I could experiment with his thoughts more than Sonic. Apparently, I get told alot in reviews that I'm good at getting inside people's minds, so Shadow was the best victim to choose for this. I don't think of Shadow as a robot, by the way--fact, I think of him as a fully artifically created life form and everything, but as a way to experiment with his thoughts I made him sound more cold-hearted-robot type._

_Hope that was good for my first Sonic one-shot! As for my Half-Life fans: hopefully I can get to that Sheckley and Griggs story without another writer's block getting in the way!_

_SHAMELESS SELF PREMOTION: If you liked this one shot, why not check out my series "Unheard Voices, Unseen Evil", a story that takes place five years after Sonic Heroes and tells us what happened to the REAL Shadow. It's at my deviantART account and my site, feel free to check it out!_

_...you can slap me now for doing that._

_Quick edit: Whoa, you need to select what characters are going to be in the story for the Sonic category? I wanted to keep Sonic's death a secret, so I only chose Shadow._

_Quick edit take two: Whoops, one of my reviewers pointed out I spelled Sonic's name wrong at the last line xD;; That's the self-proclaimed Queen of Typos for ya.  
Also, turns out the first line is what Shadow says when you killed him. Whoops. I revised it, so it sounded more like Sonic this time._


End file.
